Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by chris_wot 4420 days ago
I really have very little sympathy for him. Plenty of people have issues at home, and they don't go on a spree, taking up valuable time from emergency services and causing grief to innocent people.
2 comments

Whether he is a nice kid or an asshole has nothing to do with how laws against revealing his identity apply.
are victims under the same restrictions as the press? What if they are the same as in this case?
My guess would be that it doesn't matter. The relevant text seems to be [0], and it focuses on the act of publishing, not on who does it.

Being a victim doesn't give you any particular rights to publish this information. But the law says nothing about merely telling it to all your friends. And if you're walking the line between these two, it's probably better to talk to a lawyer before speaking.

[0] http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/Y-1.5/page-45.html#h...

Then I would say a bit of extra restraint would be appropriate. Especially if the victim has a habit of trying to engage the perps and has set himself up as an extra visible target. Imagine Billy the Kid picking fights with every kid with a gun (yes, sure it would happen the other way around as well but Krebs is doing everything to fan the flames).

It's a fine line between crime and entrapment, so when your business depends on having these crimes happen to you then you should be extra careful in how you go about dealing with the perps identities, especially if they are minors.

From the first paragraph:

> A 16-year-old male from Ottawa, Canada has been arrested for allegedly making at least 30 fraudulent calls to emergency services across North America over the past few months.

Emphasis mine.

I would agree with you were the "allegedly" missing, and if instead of "arrested for", it said "convicted of".

In the US allegedly or not, is besides the point. Everyone confesses and 'takes the deal', guilty or not.

"For 2011, the US Department of Justice reported a 93% conviction rate." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conviction_rate

The high rate of convictions for US Attorneys vis a vis state and local prosecutors stems from the higher level of prosecutorial discretion they enjoy. Basically US Attorneys only prosecute slam dunks. From the same source, you'll not that Florida for instance only has a 59% conviction rate.
As others have pointed out, it's hard to make any conclusions from a high conviction rate.

Prosecutors are only supposed to prosecute people if they think the person really did it, and if they think they can convince a jury.

Prosecutors aren't supposed to prosecute "just to find out what happens."

Is that a sign of innocent people pleading guilty or a sign of an efficient judicial system? Got any stats to back up your inference that there are significant amounts of innocent people just pleading guilty? I'm not really sure what the point of your post was, but I don't have the ability to vote it down as irrelevant.
That doesn't have ANYTHING tto do with the grandparent's comment.